Summer is really dragging. Tomorrow has nothing to look forward to and since yesterday was as uninteresting as it can get, I am pretty sure today is unlikely to be any thing different. We have stopped renting movies (since the free trial is over) and that leaves us with 3 more hours of time to kill, as if we couldn’t have enough of it. I tried sleeping early and getting up really late, but still between 11 am to 12 pm, in which I only have 4 hours of work, there is 9 hours left. Even though we get free cable in our apartment (thanks to the previous resident), it is really hard to keep watching it. There is no cricket to watch, and most movies are re-runs. Last summer was not like this. I was really occupied since I had to work close to 12 hrs a day. Not that I am complaining. I certainly made some good money out of the deal. The work was not that hard, considering, I did, honestly, about 4 hrs of work everyday and for the rest of 8 hrs, I read story books. I wasn’t a big fan of story books (any book for that matter) before. It all started in fall 2005. I started reading novels only after I came here to the US. I started my first, simply out of curiosity. For some reason everyone in my apartment were all praise for this book by Mario Puzo, and I had no idea what all the fuzz was about. I actually read a few chapters and then threw that book away. But as tough it was to remember all the Italian names in it, the urge to finish the story was huge and so I made a second attempt. After I finished the book I realized, as accepted widely, ‘The Godfather’ was one of the best mob-organized-crime books ever written. My second encounter with a story book was due to the reactions of Christian community reported in a news website despite its worldwide success. The second book was the ‘Da Vinci Code’ by Dan Brown and of course it is hard not to like that one. By the time closed out the other three of his books (to get one of which I had to make an Interlibrary loan from Ohio, about three states away), I was quite happy to have developed a habit, which I never thought I would, reading books regularly. When my first summer here came, they saved me from boredom at work. At the rate of a new book every four days, I was, clearly, doing a lot of reading. I was the Alonso of the reading books grand prix. Thanks to Sheldon, Cook, Green, Grisham and few others, summer pretty much flew by and when fall semester came, it was not that tough to open the books (text books this time, though) as it used to be. But this summer is not even close to those happy times. Even the weather is not same as last year. At 2:30 in the noon it’s a little gloomy outside now, while other days are just sunny and warmer at best (not that I am complaining). But last time, it was horribly hot and unbearably dry, even for someone like me from Chennai, India. Things got a little excited about the new ‘Rajni kanth’ movie, sivaji. The movie had all the right ingredients – The maximum guaranteed superstar in Tamil cinema, Rajni kanth, ace director Shankar, and the one and only A.R Rahman for music. All said and done, the trip to Dallas to watch the movie was not worth it. It was a high budget mediocre film, at best, and to our worries it made life little less excited.
On the brighter side, I did some good things, too. I did not miss any of the Hollywood sequels released this summer. I finished my long standing media project- a video tribute to Sachin Tendulkar, who is the Michael Schumacher of Cricket, the pride of Indian cricket team- and actually got some good responses from its viewers. I started it some 3 years ago, but after a minute or so of video making, I abandoned it. I restarted it last month and not to my surprise, it was pretty interesting. What started as an effort to pass time, culminated in a complete 5 minute Audio-Video tribute to the greatest cricket batsman the country ( and the cricketing world, for that matter) has ever seen. I surprised myself by reading Harry Potter 5 (The story never appealed to me). Since I had seen the HP 1-4 in movie format, I wasn’t expecting much. But in the end, I have to accept what more than 325 million other humans world wide have proclaimed, “Hogwarts rocks, Hermione is cool and Lord Voldemort sucks”. Thanks to the book I’ve not only passed a week in an enjoyable way, but am seriously thinking about taking quidditch lessons, if they are being taught somewhere. I read the 6th part as well, and eagerly waiting for climactic installment.
I still got about a month of summer left. But with some good movies, a nice cricket season, the deathly Hallows and some studying (yeah, really) coming up, I think I’ll cruise past the rest of summer without looking at the watch that very often.
Oh...and in case you are wondering about the video I made, here it is…
The Tendulkar Tribute.
